I've always said that I couldn't feel accomplished as a parent, I'd be useless in the boardroom and so it starts there and it ends there just like it starts in the morning at my house and it ends up at the house with my children, so they're my life source and they're everything, so I have a lot of energy. Sleep is basically overrated in my book and I wake up in the morning and it's all about my kids and when I come home at night, that's where I sort of find my peace and my sanctuary and you know, I'm powerless at home. I can't even get the remote control. I think children are very grounding.

Ofer Cohen:

The woman's struggling with the remote is Maryanne Gilmartin, one of the most powerful woman in the real estate business in New York City. Maryanne Gilmartin was until very recently, the president and chief executive officer for City New York. Earlier this month, she announced that she will be leaving her post and start a new venture, L&L mag. This interview was recorded a few weeks before her announcement. Today we're mostly going to focus on how she became such a Rockstar, developing the New York Times building Gehry's tower and leading the effort on the development of the Barclays Center, but first I want you to get a sense of what her job really means to her.

MAG:

I begin by saying that I make places and I have the best job in the world because I can create places in the greatest city in the world. People are pushing paper and pushing buttons for a living. Think about how we get to point to concrete, literally concrete representations of our toiling and you can throw your children on a hoist and take them to the top of New York by Gehry. This is a great blessing,

Ofer Cohen:

But when she started her career, people did not have the same romantic view of the industry as we all have today.

MAG:

When I started in the business in the eighties, being a real estate developer was one step above a car salesman. This was not real estate development as we know it today, where people are clamoring to get into the industry. In my generation, people flock to the Internet and so it was by pure serendipity that I became a real estate developer. I was given an urban fellowship when I graduated from university. It was an opportunity for me to pick the agency of my choosing inside of city government. Mayor Koch use this as his only recruitment tool for young individuals to try public service before going out into the private sector. I landed two fellowships. The first was for summer, the second was for an academic year. That summer was hot. New York was a dump and I was touring and meeting with every commissioner in every aspect of city government.

Ofer Cohen:

This is in the nineties?

MAG:

It's in the eighties, 86. And I remember interviewing with the police commissioner with the head of the city's department of juvenile justice. This is where I thought my passion, would take me and I stopped in economic development and they had air conditioning, carpet, they had a president and they had a board of directors and I thought, wow, this is so grown up. I'm going to hang out here for the summer. And then after that, I'll get serious about my career now I was an urban fellow and it was just after the fiscal crisis, the agency didn't have to fund the position so everybody wanted an urban fellow. So I was welcomed with open arms and it was there in that agency in the course of the first three months of the business that I realized I had real estate in my veins and I would not have known it had I not had an open mind. And I tell young people that it's great to have a plan. And as project managers we plan for a living, one must always be open to the possibility that what's looking for you and what you're looking for may just come along the way and in a sort of accidental fashion

Ofer Cohen:

And being open for this accident led to this amazing opportunity.

MAG:

I quickly realized that at that agency they would literally sit down with a map of the city and they'd say, so what do you think we should do with the west side? And I'm thinking, I'm 20 years old. I don't know anything. And they're asking for our views and it was this unbelievable collaborative spirit, but at the same time, every major developer in New York City would come through the corridors of the Public Development Corporation. So I met a lot of powerful individuals including Bruce Ratner. I negotiated the relocation of Bear Stearns to Brooklyn. And I negotiated the tax incentives as well as the job retention program that Bear Stearns was required to adhere to. And Bruce was part of that negotiation. That's where I met Bruce.

Ofer Cohen:

Bruce is Bruce Ratner, the founder of Forest City Ratner New York, and one of the most established real estate developers Of New York City. When they met he was the CEO of the company that was already involved in developing millions of square feet of retail.

MAG:

And yes, I found myself sitting across from Bruce Ratner, which was intimidating, but I never got that memo that said, you should feel intimidated when sitting across from very powerful, New York City developers. And I just did my job, but I also realized this is amazing. I could do public development on a large scale in the greatest city in the world and I could turn that into a private job and just be on the other side of the equation. Do everything I love in government and make some money, and so Bruce called me in to interview for a position about 10 years after I first met him and that was 22 years ago.

Ofer Cohen:

And that was a development job?

MAG:

Yes, I've been a hopeless developer since I realized that real estate was in my veins.

Ofer Cohen:

And this rise to being a major developer with Bruce, of course, came with additional challenge. We all know the real estate development world is highly dominated by men, so it's no secret that being the only woman in the room is an extra hurdle.

MAG:

I have a lot of stories. I would say that those are for another podcast, but suffice it to say that I was the beneficiary of a meritocracy. Bruce Ratner believed it was the best man or woman for the job, and I clearly benefited from that premise. Bruce has two daughters himself, neither of whom wanted to be in the business. Clearly, I benefited from that reality as well, but I didn't ever have to really worry about the fact that I was a woman inside of the organization and I never got that message in my inbox. That said, you are a woman and you should feel intimidated. You should worry about taking your place at the table. I felt I had a rightful place at the table.

Ofer Cohen:

Does it have to do anything with the way you grew up though?

MAG:

It might, so I came from a home that was chaotic. We functioned through dysfunction. My real father left when I was two. I was abandoned. My mother raised three girls and I think she taught us one super important principle, which is you make your own way. You find your own happiness and nobody else does that for you. I'll also say when you talk about the business and you talk about being a woman, women by their very nature collaborate and you talk about being a mom. If you can't rely on others as a working mom, you're finished and women can take a lot of disparate parts, manage those parts just like they might manage a household and do it effectively. This is not to say that men can't, but women are by their nature, very good developers. It's a Rubik's cube. It's problem-solving and it's bringing others into the fold and doing it in a collaborative way.

Ofer Cohen:

And Maryanne has certainly proved that her sensibility and temperament are a great asset, she's proven it in a consistent trajectory of the high profile project she has been spearheading.

MAG:

So as a developer, you build one great building in your career and you feel fortunate. For me, I have a Trifecta of three of the most astonishingly beautiful buildings that the city seen, that I had a small part in creating. I just consider myself to be blessed.

Ofer Cohen:

Of course, she's being humble here. Take a listen through the roles she played.

MAG:

So like children, there are no favorites. However, the New York Times building was my breakout project. It was a project I wanted to chase when we were in Brooklyn. We had just finished a big project in Time Square. We got invited to participate in a bid to be their partner and their developer, Bruce Ratner said to me, Maryanne, we're never going to win, my portraits, not in the Metropolitan Museum next to Arthur Sulzberger. We do not build buildings on Park Avenue. It's hopeless, and I said, Bruce, if it's hopeless, I'd ask that you indulge me and I'm sure I'll learn a lot along the way. Can I please chase it? He said that I would waste a lot of his time and his money, but that that's what I needed to do. Then so be it, and Lo and behold, a February 14th year, 2000, we were selected to be the partner and developer for the New York Times and invariably within the course of one single day, Bruce Ratner would say, you're going to take this company to the next level and then by evening he'd say, you're going to take this company down the risk profile is just too intense. We can't do it. When you finish a building like that, as a developer, you say, what could I possibly do that could compare, and I was given the opportunity to go downtown and build Gehry's Tower, which is the tallest building Frank Gehry has ever built and I did it down in lower Manhattan and really contributed to a new postcard image of lower Manhattan.

Ofer Cohen:

Let's not understate that these were huge accomplishments filled with hurdles and huge amounts of risk. Probably the biggest professional challenge, and Marianne was the heat around the Barclays Center development.

MAG:

It was no doubt overwhelming when I took over the project because in 2007 the project had been already ongoing for four years because it really started in 2003 when we bought the basketball team to control the move to Brooklyn. There was a community divided, there were politics Galore and it was the advent of the great recession, so many factors contributing to what made that project difficult and we also were running down the clock because the arena and needed to get into the ground. By the end of 2009, the bonds were using to build that arena, which are the same, structural bonds that were used to build Citi Field, Yankee stadium and Jets and Giants. The IRS was closing the loophole on that, that form of financing and the opposition knew that, so they literally were running down the clock and we had 99 point nine, nine, nine percent of the possession under our control. It didn't much matter because the final hold outlived on central court. So when I came into the project, we were just about in control of the site, but the part we didn't have control of was the most problematic because it meant that we couldn't begin construction on the arena, which was always the cornerstone of the project.

Ofer Cohen:

Just to clarify, here's what was going on with politics around the Barclays center development. There was a strong community opposition for the entire project for over a decade. And Maryanne walked into the middle of a huge controversial project while also having her own private life with small children at home.

MAG:

Yes. I had a very, very young daughter and a four years old and two older boys, but young children, very hard to reckon with what was being said, personalized, and otherwise, someone gave me the advice I should never read the blogs. It's not healthy and so you have to be purposeful. You have to believe in what you're doing. You need to listen and you need to solve problems. And that's where I kept my focus. We had $500,000,000 of investment of our equity in the dirt when the recession hit and not a single vertical building to show for it. I had a lot to keep me busy, so I decided to stay super focused on what was important,

Ofer Cohen:

MaryAnne, tributes here chaotic childhood on her success. She was comfortable making decisions and staying focused without all of the pieces being in place because that's what she did while growing up they were able to get things done but solving one issue meant facing another issue, and this was true right up until the end.

MAG:

The drama leading up to it. The fact that the subway, for example, wasn't complete, the arena was, and we started them in exactly the same time, but we had this provision in our transaction that said if the subway entrance was not open, we couldn't open the arena and I had nightmares. I would wake up in a cold sweat thinking I'd have to walk into Bruce's office and say

Ofer Cohen:

And this is a subway entrance that the project paid for?

MAG:

It was a subway entrance that we were required to Redo or bring back into play. It was a dormant entrance that closed in the sixties, in the original pro forma we had it in for something like $6 million dollars. It ended up costing $72 million dollars. So this subway entrance, we didn't rebuild the subway system. We just fixed the entrance, was a complicated matter. Involved a lot of public coordination. And it took a long time. And so we just finished in time. It was the week that Jay-z's concert opened that we got substantial completion sign off of that entrance. And there was a period where we were worried because the government, given the high profile nature of the project, was not going to let us open that arena if we did not have a subway verse and I would say that waking up in addition to this amazing evening where we opened the building for me, the far more glorious moment was the next day when Brooklyn was not swallowed whole by a traffic jam, when the quality of life and traffic enforcement agents that were placed around the arena that we obsessed over for a year and a half, did the work that we wanted them to do. And it was an all-around positive experience. And rather than, you know, getting chest bumps for the, for the job, I would say that it's the deafening silence that tells you that you nailed it because people stopped rallying against the arena. So opening the arena and having it be a beautiful building, a friendly neighbor.

Ofer Cohen:

And the year after that a year after the Barclays Center opened while she was moving to Brooklyn, settling in a new home and getting kids in school. She became the CEO. Right? So when, when was it that you actually took over as the president/CEO?

MAG:

So we had a two-year lead up, but in April of 2013, I was at once selling my home, buying home in Brooklyn, finding three seats for my children in a Brooklyn school and ascending to the role of president and CEO of Forest City Ratner companies.

Ofer Cohen:

That's amazing. That was a year after Barclays Center opened approximately?

MAG:

We opened in September of 2012 and I became the CEO in 2013.

Ofer Cohen:

You might think that building the Barclays Center and becoming CEO on top of the move and all that encompasses for a family. The high might of peak. But becoming CEO, building the arena were not even the main goal. The goal was building one of the largest housing projects in the city with a very large affordable housing component.

MAG:

There were 6,430 units of housing that we really were interested in. The arena was the way to get to the housing. So building 2,250 units of affordable housing, which is amongst really the most abundant affordable housing mandate in a project that's being led by a developer that really the city has seen. It had lots of dimensions to it and I think that I set my sights on how are we going to build this housing, and really finish what we started because there were many questions as you know, around our ability and our intention to build out the full project and I just turned all my focus and my team is focused on getting that job done. And today, as you know, there's over a thousand units of housing being built, of those thousand close to 900 are affordable.

Ofer Cohen:

So we all know now that she just started her own new development venture. Here's what she told us just a few weeks before announcement about her vision for the future.

MAG:

My next focus is how do we create great buildings that embraced technology, push the bounds of what we do in New York, which is pretty typical, pretty forgettable, pretty uninspired. Real estate's not been disrupted yet. So I want to be part of, or at least witness the disruption, it's the last frontier, real estates, the last great frontier where the disruption's coming and I want to be part of it. I want to push for it and I want to build around it,

Ofer Cohen:

And so you feel like, because you were able to bring a basketball team to Brooklyn, you could probably bring a tenant like Amazon to Brooklyn at some point.

MAG:

It's time. It's time for us to provide some of the great companies in this economy, a place in Brooklyn to call home. That's a super sophisticated office building. That's the best of the best because let's be frank, the talent is the best of the best, the cities, the best of the best. We need now a place for the companies to call home and that's what I want to be part of.

Ofer Cohen:

That's amazing. I'm Ofer Cohen. Thanks for listening. For more information, you can visit heybk.nyc and also email me at ocohen@terracrg.com